Will artificial intelligence (AI) ruin the academic world? This question remains unanswered as the large-scale use of AI has only begun 3 years ago. To see the impact of AI in academic writing, researchers from the United States and Germany analyzed 15 million academic writing abstracts uploaded to the PubMed database. They found that at least 13.5% (around 2.02 million) of academic writings published in 2024 received AI writing assistance.
This is based on the frequency of use of certain words before and after the AI service was first introduced. Writing about Covid-19 was used as the basis for this study. The use of certain terms and words often associated with AI writing was found to increase.
For example, before 2024, 79.2% of overused words were nouns. After 2024, 66% of overused words were verbs and 14% were adjectives. Researchers are not saying that 13.5% of this academic writing was written entirely by AI, but there are signs that it was used to write it.
Do you use AI to assist in the writing process at work? If so, there is nothing to be ashamed of because it seems that AI is also widely used in academia today.